Oracle keeps hope alive for JavaFX, Java on iOS

SAN FRANCISCO– If planned technical sessions are any indication, Oracle will remain undaunted in intentions to champion both the low-profile JavaFX rich client platform and the notion of Java on Apple’s iOS devices, where Java has been stymied.

These two subjects and enterprise Java will be among the key areas of focus at this fall’s annual JavaOne 2012 conference, with Oracle readying a full palette of presentations covering nearly every aspect of the ubiquitous software platform. The conference is being held the week of September 30 in San Francisco in conjunction with the Oracle OpenWorld 2012 conference.

A review of the sessions catalog shows Oracle’s intentions to fiercely promote JavaFX, the Java-based rich client platform that was initially launched by Sun in 2007 but which has mostly taken a back seat to other client development technologies. One session, entitled “JavaFX Extreme GUI Makeover,” will show how to build interfaces with the technology, while another, “JavaFX for Business: Monitoring a Container Terminal,” will demonstrate how to visualize business-relevant data via JavaFX. Applicability of JavaFX for online and offline functionality will be featured in JavaOne’s session, “One Client that Rules Them All,” with speakers supposedly modernizing a Windows client application. Multi-touch device support in JavaFX 2.1 and using JavaFX 2 with the Scala language will be covered in sessions as well.

The issue of Java on iOS, Apple’s popular device platform that has prohibited Java, will be brought to the forefront in the session, “Java on iOS: Developing Applications for Mobile Devices.” The session description states: “The Apple iOS operating system, used in the highly popular iPad and iPhone mobile devices, is a critically important platform that lacks Java support. This session describes the efforts underway to close this gap and bring the latest Java standards, including JDK (Java SE Development Kit) 7 and JDK 8, to the iOS platforms. It addresses some of the challenges of using Java on iOS and how Oracle has addressed these issues.”

In the enterprise Java realm, attendees can speak their minds to specification leads for Java Platform, Java EE (Enterprise Edition), and GlassFish, the application server that acts as a Java EE reference implementation, during a session entitled, “GlassFish Unconference: Let Your Voice be Heard.” Meanwhile, Java EE’s expected future directions will be covered in another session, “Java EE.Next: Java EE 7, 8, and Beyond.” The focus of Java EE 7 and 8 is mostly on cloud computing, according to the session description. But there will be more to these releases. “Java EE will, of course, also update itself for trends such as HTML5, caching, NoSQL, polyglot programming, map/reduce, JSON, REST, and improvements to existing core APIs.” Attendees also can hear about Java EE and WebSocket communications support in another session, “WebSocket and Java EE: A State of the Union.”

Java Virtual Machine technologies also will be aired. A session entitled “A “Showdown at the JVM Corral” will feature discussions by the Oracle HotSpot/Oracle Java Mission Control and IBM J9 teams about approaches to implementing JVMs. For connoisseurs of alternative languages running on the JVM, JavaOne will feature a session on what is new in Groovy 2.0 and, again in the spirit of “The Lord of the Rings,” a session entitled “Clojure/ClojureScript: One Language to Rule the Web.”

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